Technologies

The 5 Best Uses (So Far) for ChatGPT’s AI Chatbot

How a complex AI chatbot can make your life easier, one task at a time.

The new AI tool ChatGPT has inspired excitement and worry with its ability to instantly answer complex questions. In the days after its debut, people have discovered many ways it can make their lives easier — including five we’ve found that rise above the rest.

ChatGPT is a chat-based tool built by research lab OpenAI that answers questions with somewhat conversational dialogue. Its natural language abilities will delight anyone who’s had to rephrase questions to get answers out of Siri or Alexa. The AI, trained on the vast tracts of text available on the internet, knows about information only through 2021. But it’s got an abundance of information on nitty-gritty details and big concepts. That’s got some educators agitated, but as long as you use it carefully, it can be something of a bonus brain.

To be clear, ChatGPT isn’t a perfect substitute for doing your own research — it doesn’t separate fact from fiction, as CNET science editor Jackson Ryan noted while detailing its present weaknesses in critical thinking. ChatGPT can answer questions and explain complex concepts, but its potential for inaccuracy has led StackOverflow to temporarily ban ChatGPT generated software.

That said, there are several ways ChatGPT can make your life easier, cooked up by people looking for AI benefits. If you just want to save time on some tasks — and aren’t cheating on your English Lit paper — here are some cool ways to use ChatGPT.

Get a chatbot to save you money

In a matter of weeks, a GPT-powered bot could lower the prices of your bills. Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay — the «world’s first robot lawyer» that helps people fight traffic tickets and other bills — tweeted that the company is building a Chrome extension based on ChatGPT’s tech foundation to negotiate lower bills from internet providers, hospitals and more.

The extension will enter closed beta testing in mid-December, before an open beta in the first week of January. Though DoNotPay has been lowering bills for years, its rules-based model could only pick fights wherever users could submit online complaint forms. After integrating the conversational tech behind ChatGPT, DoNotPay can negotiate back-and-forth with any service that has chat for customer service, opening up the range of bills that can be challenged to include medical bills, credit reports and landlord-tenant disputes.

«You can say to the bot, ‘Go get me a refund for poor in-flight Wi-Fi’; it’ll have your personal details saved and send [the complaint],» Browder told CNET. He believes the more natural language of the requests will be less suspicious than the rigid form letters DoNotPay had been sending before, allowing it to challenge more discerning — and expensive — institutions, like hospitals.

The GPT-powered extension will be free for part of its beta testing phase then eventually be added into DoNotPay’s current bill-challenging subscription service, which costs $36 every three months.

Like Google’s Duplex AI making voice calls for you, the future could be bots doing all the tedious legwork to get you better deals and cheaper bills.

Make a diet and workout plan

Changing your diet and planning an exercise routine takes work. To make it easier, Alex Cohen, a senior director of product at Carbon Health, used ChatGPT to make a health-improving plan with a daily calorie target, exercise suggestions, a weeklong list of meals and even a shopping list for all the necessary ingredients. He tweeted out his method in an illuminating thread:

Cohen broke down his plan in a series of steps, calculating his personal health metrics, asking for meals that would fit his daily caloric and nutritional needs, asking for a shopping list, and then an exercise plan to meet his needs.

ChatGPT is no substitute for a physician and dietitian who can cater a plan to your specific needs and physiology — a caution the tool will tell you if you repeat Cohen’s search terms. But it’s an easy way to sketch out a health plan blueprint that you can check over yourself or bring to a health care professional.

Generate the next week’s meals with a grocery list

A variation from the last point is worth spotlighting for anyone planning a week’s worth of meals for multiple people.

First, ask ChatGPT for a list of meals, explain how many people you’re cooking for and whether you’re interested in dinners, breakfasts or lunches. Include any preferences and dietary restrictions. Detail how many days you want dining ideas, and poof, you have a list of meals.

Next, ask for a shopping list for those meals. You’ll get a pretty basic list of ingredients, so if you want exact amounts, you’ll need to fine-tune your request. For example, you might want to ask for the total amount of ingredients for all the meals listed. GPT produces a shopping list with the number of cans, ounces, pounds and cups of each ingredient you’ll need for a week’s worth of meals.

Create a bedtime story for kids

ChatGPT-generated prose hasn’t topped the bestseller lists yet, especially since it hasn’t gotten the knack for creative style. But the tool can make a passable bedtime tale for children, concocting simple plots and language from basic prompts. For instance, I chose a cat who wanted to go to space, and ChatGPT gave me the tale of Max, who clawed his way past many obstacles to achieve his dreams among the stars.

Stanford grad student in machine learning Eric Zelikman tweeted the idea of using ChatGPT to generate a bedtime story and then feeding that text into OpenAI’s DALL-E image-generating tool for illustrations.

It isn’t going to replace traditionally published children’s books. But if you’re pressed for time or away from your kid’s trove of bedtime tales, generating one through OpenAI’s tools can be helpful.

Prep for an interview

If you need to prepare to interview an exciting source, you can ask ChatGPT to generate some thought-provoking questions, as entrepreneur Seth Bannon tweeted.

That could be handy if you’re a journalist, or if you’re grilling somebody on stage at an industry conference, prepping for a job interview or preparing for a dinner with someone you want to impress.

You can even use it as a chat partner to set up mock conversations to practice what you’re going to say. You can instruct it to respond in other languages or translate specific phrases, too. You could also use it to help refine your cover letters and emails for a bit of professional polish. ChatGPT isn’t perfect, but when there’s a lot of example copy on the internet it can crib from, it can be an adept communicator.

Technologies

CNET Daily Tariff Price Tracker: I’m Watching 11 Key Products for Changes, Here’s What’s Happened

The deadline for the start of Trump’s heaviest tariffs has been delayed until next month, leaving consumers stuck with more uncertainty over prices.

For the last three months, tariffs have been a hot topic, leaving consumers and businesses alike worried: Will they hike prices and by how much? It’s a question more relevant than ever this week, as President Trump punts another major deadline down the road and price-slashing Amazon’s Prime Day sales wind down as the week ends.

Amid those worries, I’ve been tracking prices every day for 11 key products likely to be hit by tariff-induced price increases, and the answer I’ve come to so far is this: Not so much, at least not yet. The winding road of tariff inflation still stretches before us into an uncertain future, so the threat of price hikes continues to cloud the horizon.

To date, I’ve seen two noteworthy price increases, one for the Xbox Series X and the other for a popular budget-friendly 4K TV. Some other products — including Apple’s popular AirPods and printer ink — have gone on sale for brief periods.

CNET Tariff Tracker Index

Above, you can check out a chart with the average price of the 11 products included in this piece over the course of 2025. This will help give you a sense of the overall price changes and fluctuations going on. Further down, you’ll be able to check out charts for each individual product being tracked.

We’ll be updating this article regularly as prices change. It’s all in the name of helping you make sense of things, so be sure to check back every so often. For more, check out CNET’s guide to whether you should wait to make big purchases or buy them now and get expert tips about how to prepare for a recession.

Methodology

We’re checking prices daily and will update the article and the relevant charts right away to reflect any changes. The following charts show a single bullet point for each month, with the most recent one labeled «Now» and showing the current price. For the past months, we’ve gone with what was the most common price for each item in the given month.

In most cases, the price stats used in these graphs were pulled from Amazon using the historical price-tracker tool Keepa. For the iPhones, the prices come from Apple’s official materials and are based on the 128-gigabyte base model of the latest offering of the iPhone 16. For the Xbox Series X, the prices were sourced from Best Buy using the tool PriceTracker. If any of these products happen to be on sale at a given time, we’ll be sure to let you know and explain how those price drops differ from longer-term pricing trends that tariffs can cause.

The 11 products we’re tracking

Mostly what we’re tracking in this article are electronic devices and digital items that CNET covers in depth, like iPhones and affordable 4K TVs — along with a typical bag of coffee, a more humble product that isn’t produced in the US to any significant degree.

The products featured were chosen for a few reasons: Some of them are popular and/or affordable representatives for major consumer tech categories, like smartphones, TVs and game consoles. Others are meant to represent things that consumers might buy more frequently, like printer ink or coffee beans. Some products were chosen over others because they are likely more susceptible to tariffs. Some of these products have been reviewed by CNET or have been featured in some of our best lists.

iPhone 16, 128GB
Duracell AA batteries, 24-pack
Samsung DU7200 65-inch TV
Xbox Series X
Apple AirPods Pro 2 with USB-C case
HP 962 CMY Printer Ink
Anker 10,000-mAh, 30-watt power bank
Bose TV speaker
Oral-B Pro 1000 electric toothbrush
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook, 256GB
Starbucks 28-ounce ground dark roast coffee

Below, we’ll get into more about each individual product, and stick around till the end for a rundown of some other products worth noting.

iPhone 16

The iPhone is the most popular smartphone brand in the US, so this was a clear priority for price tracking. The iPhone has also emerged as a major focal point for conversations about tariffs, given its popularity and its susceptibility to import taxes because of its overseas production, largely in China. Trump has reportedly been fixated on the idea that the iPhone can and should be manufactured in the US, an idea that experts have dismissed as a fantasy. Estimates have also suggested that a US-made iPhone would cost as much as $3,500.

Something to note about this graph: The price listed is the one you’ll see if you buy your phone through a major carrier. If you, say, buy direct from Apple or Best Buy without a carrier involved, you’ll be charged an extra $30, so in some places, you might see the list price of the standard iPhone 16 listed as $830.

Apple’s been taking a few steps to protect its prices in the face of these tariffs, flying in bulk shipments of product before they took effect and planning to move production for the US market from China to India. A new Reuters report found that a staggering 97% of iPhones imported from the latter country, March through May, were bound for the US. This latter move drew the anger of Trump again, threatening the company with a 25% tariff if they didn’t move production to the US, an idea CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly shot down in the past. This came after Trump gave a tariff exemption to electronic devices including smartphones, so the future of that move seems in doubt now.

Duracell AA batteries

A lot of the tech products in your home might boast a rechargeable energy source but individual batteries are still an everyday essential and I can tell you from experience that as soon as you forget about them, you’ll be needing to restock. The Duracell AAs we’re tracking are some of the bestselling batteries on Amazon.

Samsung DU7200 TV

Alongside smartphones, televisions are some of the most popular tech products out there, even if they’re an infrequent purchase. This particular product is a popular entry-level 4K TV and was CNET’s pick for best overall budget TV for 2025. Unlike a lot of tech products that have key supply lines in China, Samsung is a South Korean company, so it might have some measure of tariff resistance.

After spending most of 2025 hovering around $400, this item has now seen some notable upticks on Amazon, most recently sitting around $450. This could potentially be in reaction to Trump’s announcement of 25% tariffs against South Korea this week.

Xbox Series X

Video game software and hardware are a market segment expected to be hit hard by the Trump tariffs. Microsoft’s Xbox is the first console brand to see price hikes — the company cited «market conditions» along with the rising cost of development. Most notably, this included an increase in the price of the flagship Xbox Series X, up from $500 to $600. Numerous Xbox accessories also were affected and the company also said that «certain» games will eventually see a price hike from $70 to $80.

Initially, we were tracking the price of the much more popular Nintendo Switch as a representative of the gaming market. Nintendo has not yet hiked the price of its handheld-console hybrid and stressed that the $450 price tag of the upcoming Switch 2 has not yet been inflated because of tariffs. Sony, meanwhile, has so far only increased prices on its PlayStation hardware in markets outside the US.

AirPods Pro 2

The latest iteration of Apple’s wildly popular true-wireless earbuds are here to represent the headphone market. Much to the chagrin of the audiophiles out there, a quick look at sales charts on Amazon shows you just how much the brand dominates all headphone sales. For most of the year, they’ve hovered around $199, but ahead of Prime Day sales this week they are currently on sale for $149.

HP 962 CMY printer ink

This HP printer ink includes cyan, magenta and yellow all in one product and recently saw its price jump from around $72 — where it stayed for most of 2025 — to $80, which is around its highest price over the last five years. We will be keeping tabs to see if this is a long-term change or a brief uptick.

This product replaced Overture PLA Filament for 3D printers in this piece, but we’re still tracking that item.

Anker 10,000-mAh, 30-watt power bank

Anker’s accessories are perennially popular in the tech space and the company has already announced that some of its products will get more expensive as a direct result of tariffs. This specific product has also been featured in some of CNET’s lists of the best portable chargers.

Bose TV speaker

Soundbars have become important purchases, given the often iffy quality of the speakers built into TVs. While not the biggest or the best offering in the space, the Bose TV Speaker is one of the more affordable soundbar options out there, especially hailing from a brand as popular as Bose. You can currently get this model at a healthy discount for Prime Day, down to $200 from $280.

Oral-B Pro 1000 electric toothbrush

They might be a lot more expensive than their traditional counterparts but electric toothbrushes remain a popular choice for consumers because of how well they get the job done. I know my dentist won’t let up on how much I need one. This particular Oral-B offering was CNET’s overall choice for the best electric toothbrush for 2025.

While this product hasn’t seen its price budge one way or another most of the year, there is a $10 coupon listed on Amazon right now.

Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook

Lenovo is notable among the big laptop manufacturers for being a Chinese company making its products especially susceptible to Trump’s tariffs.

Starbucks Ground Coffee (28-ounce bag)

Coffee is included in this tracker because of its ubiquity —I’m certainly drinking too much of it these days —and because it’s uniquely susceptible to Trump’s tariff agenda. Famously, coffee beans can only be grown within a certain distance from Earth’s equator, a tropical span largely outside the US and known as the «Coffee Belt.»

Hawaii is the only part of the US that can produce coffee beans, with data from USAFacts showing that 11.5 million pounds were harvested there in the 2022-23 season — little more than a drop in the mug, as the US consumed 282 times that amount of coffee during that period. Making matters worse, Hawaiian coffee production has declined in the past few years.

All that to say: Americans get almost all of their coffee from overseas, making it one of the most likely products to see price hikes from tariffs.

Other products

As mentioned, we occasionally swap out products with different ones that undergo notable price shifts. Here are some things no longer featured above, but that we’re still keeping an eye on:

Nintendo Switch: The baseline handheld-console hybrid has held steady around $299 most places — including Amazon — since it released in 2017. Whether that price will be affected by tariffs or the release of the Switch 2 remains to be seen. This product was replaced above with the Xbox Series X.
Overture PLA 3D printer filament: This is a popular choice on Amazon for the material needed to run 3D printers. It has held steady around $15 on Amazon all year. This product was replaced above by the HP 962 printer ink.

Here are some products we also wanted to single out that haven’t been featured with a graph yet:

Razer Blade 18 (2025), 5070 Ti edition: The latest revision of Razer’s largest gaming laptop saw a $300 price bump recently, with the base model featured an RTX 5070 Ti graphics card now priced at $3,500 ahead of launch, compared to the $3,200 price announced in February. While Razer has stayed mum about the reasoning, it did previously suspend direct sales to the US as Trump’s tariff plans were ramping up in April.
Asus ROG Ally X: The premium version of Asus’s Steam Deck competitor handheld gaming PC recently saw a price hike from $799 to $899, coinciding with the announcement of the company’s upcoming Xbox-branded Ally handhelds.

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Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for July 12 #496

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 12 No. 496.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

If you love attending baseball games in summer, you’ll hit a home run with today’s NYT Strands puzzle. If you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: In the ballpark.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Play ball!

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

TEER, MEER, MEET, TEEM, ROAD, STALL, TALL, BEST, PEAT, LUNH, CULT, BUMP, BILE, PEAL, METE, BULL, STUN, NUTS

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers: